star trek

NASA this week has delivered the next of several shuttles from their now-complete program, this most recent perhaps being the most famous in its name and history: The Space Shuttle Enterprise. This particular shuttle was never actually flown into space, instead reserved for test missions vital to the success of the NASA shuttle program. This shuttle was named after the popular 1960's Star Trek Original Series ship, the Starship Enterprise, and was greeted at its birth and here at its final resting place by no less than Mr Spock himself!

Growing up I tried to watch the original Star Trek on many occasions because it always seemed to be on during the summer. I just couldn't watch it, the show was too cheesy. When Star Trek: TNG hit the air with Picard at the helm, I really liked that show and Picard is the Star Trek captain for me. If you're a Trekkie, you need book your tickets to London for this October to attend the "Destination Star Track London" fan event.

If you ever wanted to be Captain Kirk, you obviously need a captain's chair. Sure, you can craft your own from that metal folding chair your mom has since 1972 and a black Sharpie, but that won't get you any geek cred. What you need is to cough up to $24.99 and order ThinkGeek's new Star Trek Inflatable Captain's Chair.

If you've ever watched Star Trek be it the old series or some of the newer series, you've seen the characters using tricorders. The tricorder is a little medical diagnostic device that is widely used in the Star Trek universe. People have been working to make the tricorder real and there is even a tricorder X prize for the first researchers to make a functional device.

I was never a big fan of the original Star Trek series. It seemed like during the summers a kid it was on TV all the time, and I couldn't get past how cheesy it seemed. I am much more camp Piccard than camp Kirk. This is an interesting story about the original Star Trek, and if you're a fan of the original series, you may remember "The Doomsday Machine" episode. That episode was apparently one of the more popular episodes of the original series and was written by Norman Spinrad.

If 3D printing advances as fast as 2D printing advanced, we'll be working with our own Replicators from Star Trek by the year 2080. It took just 40 years for the original printing press to turn over from the single Gutenberg press to get to a mass production scale across Europe, and much, much less time for computers to advance from massive machines to teeny-tiny chips. With advances like home-bound do it yourself printers and the fact that pirate sites across the web are now sharing model files so that you might print your own objects at home without effort, we've not got much time at all before advances are made to the tune of Earl Gray, Hot.

If we told you that a man who was able to create a replica of the Star Trek Voyager starship in his apartment ended up being served divorce papers by his wife, you probably wouldn't be that surprised. But if we told you that same amazing apartment was going to be destroyed by said wife, you'd probably at least be disappointed. That is the story of a poor unfortunate nerd named Tony Alleyne.

I would wager that there are a bunch of you out there that like Star Trek as much as I do. I'm not dressing up in pointy ears or anything, but I can appreciate some awesome Star Trek gear when I see it. Take this coffee table for instance. If there was ever a cooler project for a geek with a wood working background, I haven't seen it.

If you track this story all the way back to the source, you might find the actual factual bits to be less than brick solid, but just like the codename on which this Android-based Siri opponent is based, the reality of the situation might be much less important than what COULD be should the future unfold how this story reads. What we're to understand here is that Google's propensity to select much better codenames than the manufacturers who create phones based on their mobile OS Android continues here with "Majel," a voice controlled assistant made to compete against Apple's iPhone 4S-based Siri. Majel is short for Majel Barrett, both Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's wife and the voice of the computer on the starship Enterprise*.

While the rest of the world was running around crashing its head into a wall in excitement over the just-revealed Galaxy Nexus and finalized Ice Cream Sandwich from Google, we had a sit-down with several Android authorities, one of whom, Matias Duarte to be exact, had a rather interesting take on the difference between voice controls in Android and Apple's Siri. As you well know, one of the biggest features on the newest set of Apple mobile hardware and software is Siri, a voice-controlled assistant, where Android still totes several voice-activated features across the board. What we heard from Duarte in Hong Kong was that he's thought long and hard about this situation and has come up with the nerdiest explanation of all.